Call for work road risk action
Call for work road risk action
There is 'massive scope' for co-ordinated global action to reduce the number of people killed and injured when they are driving for work, a UK safety charity has said. Roger Bibbings, the occupational safety adviser with the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA), told a conference in Washington DC this week, hosted by the US government's National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, that work-related incidents account for 25 per cent of road crashes across the globe. The figure is 50 per cent if commuting is included. He said: "Some initial work on international comparisons by RoSPA suggests that there is much scope for sharing experiences and approaches to MORR [managing occupational road risk] between EU member states as well as more widely, with action taken in the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan to name but a few. Given the explosion of motorisation globally and the scale of the worldwide road casualty epidemic, the case for international co-operation in this vital area is unassailable.' He said in the UK between a quarter and a third of all road crashes are estimated to involve a person and/or a vehicle at work at the time. This means that every week about 200 people are killed or seriously injured in 'at-work' crashes. Mr Bibbings added 'those businesses which will not 'see the light' need to 'feel the heat' of firmer enforcement and, in this context, attention is now firmly fixed on the first cases of corporate manslaughter to be taken in the wake of the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act.'
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